Néstor García
Las Palmeras y lo Tropical, 2025
Oil on anchovy tin cans
10 x 200 cm | 3.94 x 78.74 in
At its core, it is a paradoxical inventory of these representations—ones that are already the product of a radical taxonomizing process—meant to reflect on these very paradoxes. Moreover, encapsulating them in a series of small-format cans points to the idea that the rationalist inventorying of the world is itself a metaphor for the modern utopia of concentrating all knowledge into a defined space.
Our essentially Western utopia of taxonomizing and inventorying the world in its entirety has weighed upon our shoulders like the globe upon Atlas. Perhaps this utopia is, in a way, being fulfilled—or at least softened—through our contemporary oracle: the internet. Back in the days when the fever for inventories shaped the ways we saw, understood, and related to that unpleasant, ambiguous, and even elusive category called reality—and when the early establishment of a radically rationalist regime was taking shape—a number of European explorers, most notably the German Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), set out on expeditions to the “Equinoctial Regions” of the Latin American continent, seeking to uncover its deepest mysteries.
These routes, which marked the imposition of certain ways of understanding our territories, also contributed to the shaping of a visuality that stemmed from an exoticizing aesthetic projection. They established specific modes of seeing that idealized what our landscapes really were—and still are. As part of an ongoing research project on the establishment of scopic regimes (forms and politics of seeing), and taking these processes of exotification or aesthetic projection as a starting point (beyond any moral evaluation), we developed this project to address the cliché that palm trees have become—as metaphors for Latin America and the Caribbean.
At its core, it is a paradoxical inventory of these representations—ones that are already the product of a radical taxonomizing process—meant to reflect on these very paradoxes. Moreover, encapsulating them in a series of small-format cans points to the idea that the rationalist inventorying of the world is itself a metaphor for the modern utopia of concentrating all knowledge into a defined space.
These routes, which marked the imposition of certain ways of understanding our territories, also contributed to the shaping of a visuality that stemmed from an exoticizing aesthetic projection. They established specific modes of seeing that idealized what our landscapes really were—and still are. As part of an ongoing research project on the establishment of scopic regimes (forms and politics of seeing), and taking these processes of exotification or aesthetic projection as a starting point (beyond any moral evaluation), we developed this project to address the cliché that palm trees have become—as metaphors for Latin America and the Caribbean.
At its core, it is a paradoxical inventory of these representations—ones that are already the product of a radical taxonomizing process—meant to reflect on these very paradoxes. Moreover, encapsulating them in a series of small-format cans points to the idea that the rationalist inventorying of the world is itself a metaphor for the modern utopia of concentrating all knowledge into a defined space.